Wednesday, January 27, 2010

inside the human head

Beyond the blood and bone, nerves and dendrites, there is a magic kingdom. A palace of feeling. Darkness hangs over the castle for many and for long duration. For others, soft fairy lights chase away the shadows, leaving the courtyard a-glimmer with contentedness...at least for a while.

Materialists have no doubt that one day, the kingdom will be broken into and disenchanted. That science will eventually know the weight of experience and the texture of its sublimation. And that feeling will be given its proper place amid the spectra of an organism's mechanistic palpitations.

I don't buy it.

A trillion shards of time have gone into the subtle make-up of a person's inner self. No instrument and no form of analysis is capable of tracking the elusive reflections of time-shards from the mirror of a human soul. The eyes have it. At least they project some of it. They turn time into something nearly physical, but not quite. You can almost touch the time in a person's eyes, but not quite.

The eyes speak silently of feeling. They remind us that the world is haunted by personalities, not just populated with them. Any moment -- any encounter -- can generate an untold number of impressions. There are not enough stars in the universe or grains of sand on all the planets' beaches to act as place-holders for a single person's impressions. These are beyond calculation, beyond arithmetic. Beyond the physical. Because if I've got my science right, information requires a physical substrate on which to ride through reality's grand Mardi Gras. But time has no physical skin. It's wild and free. It is pure anarchy, and it loves to dance with us. Loves to tango and waltz. And from those dances, it weaves us deeper into the sad smile of God.